When we start a meal of CI in our classrooms, we don’t need to clutter our students’ plates with too much food. We only need to offer them three basic foods – steak, fries, and peas.
Steak. What is that in our comprehensible input classroom? That’s easy. It’s the main thing, the thing that our kids absolutely must have to thrive – SLOW. Yes, our going slowly is the key to their being fed properly. If we don’t go slowly enough, they can’t chew our words enough – they can’t understand what we are saying.
Fries. What is that? That’s another easy one. The fries represent repetitive questioning. Circling. Yup. Without circling, our comprehensible input meal becomes undigestable to the kids. Circling guarantees that the kids will properly digest the meal.
Well, then, what are the peas? I see the peas as the Point and Pause skill. Of course, teenagers don’t like vegetables, so we do need to limit the extent to which we use Point and Pause. Overused, it doesn’t do a thing for the CI. Maybe 15-20 peas in a lesson , tops. Too many new terms in the input can confuse them. If a pea rolls off the CI plate and onto the floor, no big deal. The dog will eat it. Or it might roll out the door. It won’t be missed. But the Point and Pause skill does allow for a certain degree of introducing new stuff. It is nowhere nearly as important as SLOW and repetitive questioning, to be sure.
And dessert? What about dessert? In my opinion, dessert is the fun stuff that happens during the class, the personalization, the thin slicing, the bizarre stuff that makes us laugh. Dessert is never guaranteed in a CI class, and we never know when it will be served, so the teacher who actually tries to manufacture it will almost certainly be disappointed. Of course, dessert is certainly more likely to be served when the steak, potatoes, and peas have been sufficiently polished off.
All those other TPRS skills? They are not that necessary for the kids. If we just serve our three course CI meal slowly, with lots of repetitive questions, and, to a limited extent, the veggies, then our students will have all they need to make great gains in their acquisition of the target language.
All those other skills that make us think that comprehensible input is difficult are not necessary. Good old meat and potatoes with a vegetable. Good old American cooking! That’ll stick to their ribs!